


Again

by Viridian5



Category: Andromeda
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-04-08
Updated: 2003-04-08
Packaged: 2017-10-02 07:12:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viridian5/pseuds/Viridian5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harper is more sensitive than most people realize.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Again

**Author's Note:**

> Seeing "The Dark Backward" is essential to understanding this story.
> 
> Spoilers for "The Dark Backward," plus smaller stuff for "Angel Dark, Demon Bright," "Ouroboros," "Lava and Rockets," "Tunnel at the End of the Light," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "The Unconquerable Man," and "Delenda Est."

I slid down the ladder and surveyed the mess in Engineering. Damn, damn, damn. "C’mon," I said, "I just fixed that!"

Oh. Oh.

Next thing I knew, I had my back against the table, my gun in my hand, and my heart pounding. Felt like somebody had tapdanced over my grave, then stopped and rewound to tapdance back over my grave backward. Something bad had happened here, something bad aside from having a wacky, time traveling dark knight rip through my ever so meticulous work.

Okay, calm. Calm. Harper freakout over and done.

Too bad my heart and stomach wouldn’t get the message. They kept thudding.

Scary, yeah, but not a totally unreasonable reaction, not with the Andromeda Ascendant being weirdness central. My jittery ways had more to them than just caffeine abuse. I’d been getting déjà vu moments almost from the moment I’d started living here, and they’d been getting more frequent since I’d built the tesseract machine. When I stood over Gaheris Rhade’s body, for a minute I had the weird feeling that I knew and liked him, that he hated Nietzscheans about as much as I did, and that it was weird having Dylan standing across from me in the flesh, alive. All of which was crazy, because Rhade was a filthy traitor who’d died 300 years ago, so I’d never met him. We, the modern Andromeda crew, had been an integral part of a battle that had happened almost 300 years before I was born. Everybody had gotten a good laugh over high-strung Harper seeing a ghost until they found out it was actually a crazy AI based on some dead crewmember out for revenge. Aliens dropped in on us from literally out of nowhere. Trance replied to sentences I never said, and she was from a future that wouldn’t happen now. One of my captains was a human older than the Long Night. Life was crazy, not me.

"Are you okay?" Trance asked as she walked in with an odd look on her face. She was smiling too hard too.

"Yeah," I answered, straightening up and pulling myself together for company, "I just had a moment when it felt like somebody danced on my grave. Probably delayed adrenaline from the ship almost getting destroyed again. No big."

Her odd look shifted into the greater odd range. It looked to me like guilt. Guilt? "Probably." She handed me a can. "I figured you’d be working hard, so I thought you might like a Sparky."

I held it like it might have snakes in it. I couldn’t help it. "Uh, thanks."

She could just be doing it to be nice. Early purple Trance used to do nice things for me just because.

Though I’d started to wonder if she’d ever done anything just because.

I was starting to warm to gold Trance from the future, but she still gave me a bit of a wiggins. The first moment I saw her, I felt an instant distrust like nothing I’d ever known before. Then she’d saved my life... which kept Höhne dead. She gave me a Sparky Cola and made nice not long after that, and I figured she just wanted to get in good with me again. Or she wanted to divert me off the path of wondering how much of what we went through came from her pulling strings. I never totally forgot that.

Lately she’d been acting more like purple pixie Trance again. Right now she might just be trying to be nice.

But her ingratiating cheerfulness had a too bright glare and a brittle edge.

She’d done something again, I knew it, and this was a kind of apology without telling me what she was apologizing for. Just like the last time?

I had to wonder what the hell she’d done to me to earn me a Sparky and this look. She’d probably never tell.

Trance’s guilty look had shifted to suspicion. Damn. Glibness, don’t fail me now. "Thanks, Trance. Cleaning up after time traveling men is thirsty work." When I opened the can and took a long drink, I couldn’t taste it at all.

 

### END

 

_NOTE:_ I have some very dark thoughts about how involved Trance was in keeping Harper infested with Magog larvae and forced to build the tesseract machine so she could mess with the timeline with impunity to get things right. Thus, I think that Sparky in "Lava and Rockets" was a kind of apology for a lot of hell....


End file.
